We have this dedicated category for incoming email on here@example.org. When someone sends an email from this address, replies are captured into this category.
Subsequent replies however, do not seem to detect they belong to the same email thread, and create a new topic with a single post every time.
Discourse should detect an existing topic and create a response instead of a new topic.
How to solve it?
I don’t know yet how to solve it, but I’d be interested in helping debugging this issue since we use email-in quite extensively and this is making our life difficult, especially when multiple people are involved in a conversation, as they might miss previous teammate replies and overburden third parties with potentially contradictory or redundant information.
Oh boy, sorry you are having to deal with this. Email is hard!
Has this ever worked for you before or is this a new setup that you are trying that is not working? What email-in method are you using? POP3 or mail-receiver?
Can you explain your setup and process in a little more detail? I am a little confused. I don’t think you can expect to have the replies all associated with the same topic if the email people are replying to did not come from Discourse.
I have a category set up this way on my neighborhood forum as a sort of yahoo group replacement. People can write to that category’s custom incoming email address which creates the topic and gets distributed to everyone watching the category (which by default is everybody). They can also start topics directly on the forum which also get distributed. Any replies by email are associated with the topic that is created, and also get distributed.
Yet, if Discourse received a copy, it should be able to identify replies, since they bear a thread of Message-ID, References and In-Reply-To headers. Moreover, the Subject headers should remain close enough (mostly the “Re:” that can change across languages), then it should be trivial to process replies to an existing topic in most cases. I think that’s what most email clients are doing?
I would be interested in learning about what would prevent Discourse from implementing proper email threading for any email it receives, not just emails it generates. Since email-in is a feature, there should be a way to ensure proper usability. Again, I’m happy to give a hand. Where should I look?
In my case, an email address assigned to a Discourse category is sending the email, then a conversation starts among people using various email addresses. Discourse receives everything. Although it didn’t generate the headers, they are consistent and related to each other.
Like I said in my reply.. email is hard. Others with more knowledge can weigh in, but personally I’d suggest not expecting so much of Discourse and email. It’s an online platform after all, and not a listserv. If you expect an email exchange with a handful of participants from/including an email address associated with a Discourse category to behave as though it were an email client, you will be disappointed.
If you are keen to dig deeper, you could collect and look at info from the affected emails, from an email client, including the email headers and email clients used (outlook is notorious for misbehaving), and see if you can glean something.
I wonder if something with the reply keys doesn’t work.
I found this quite old topic Reply own mail creates new topic - #2 by gerhard
Maybe you could disable the Find related post with key to test if that improves things.
